REPORT FROM M ADRID in 1991 displayed very little of the dazzle that made Vienna in 1815 and Versailles in 1919 major landmarks of diplomatic history, but in the annals of peace conferences it will exercise claims of its own. Vienna and Versailles were the postludes of great wars whose outcomes had been determined-the N apoleonic Wars in the first instance, the First W orld War in the second. The principals who gathered at them were all victors, who in due course fell to quarrelling over division of the spoils, but who nonetheless shared the cama- raderie of their triumphant alliances. Vienna and Versailles were celebra- tions, as much as they were occasions to shape a world order. The Madrid peace conference, without banquets or balls, interrupted a war that is very much in progress. Analysts may dis- pute whether the war began late in the last century, when the Zionists en- countered the Arabs while building their first settlements in Ottoman Palestine, or in 1948, when Israel outmatched these Arabs to snatch its independence from the debris of Britain's Middle East empire. In this war, fought in the desert and in the sunless alleys of ancient cities, Israel has won most of the battles, but its enemies remain undefeated. That the combatants showed up at all is the Madrid conference's chief claim on history. Their presence emitted a sur- prising signal that they may at last have had enough. The Madrid conference was, how- ever, Clausewitz turned upside down- a carrying out of war by other means. Both sides agreed to attend not because of any change of heart but because of major strategic shifts in the Middle East The intifada, the revolutionary struggle waged with slingshots and stones by the Palestinians in the occu- pied territories since 1987, had exacted a toll from the Israelis-psychologi- cally, if not militarily. Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War had cost Israel's en- emies a vital strategic reserve, what- ever stand the various Arab govern- ments took on Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait. Israelis and Arabs both recognized that the end of the Cold War had left the United States the only force that mattered in the Middle East. For Israel, Washington's long- 57 MADRID time client, no less than for those Arabs who were once dependencies of Moscow, the change meant that America's preferences could no longer be ignored, and in organizing the peace conference Secretary of State James Baker, without ever abandoning his tact, left no doubt that the United States would use its power to enforce those preferences. The strategic changes insured that the combatants would come to the meeting, but would come reluctantly, sullenly, suspiciously. Such an attitude virtually guaranteed that the Arab- Israeli war would continue at Madrid in the form of bickering, denunciation, posturing, and maneuvering. For some time, Baker had been urging both sides to undertake confidence-building mea- sures, in the hope of getting the con- ference off to a good start. For the Israelis, the most important of these would have been to halt the construc- tion of settlements in the occupied territories; for the Palestinians, it would have been to call an end to the intifada. N either side had the necessary good will-or political flexibility-to make such a unilateral move, however, and all efforts to reach a mutually advan- tageous deal failed. Instead, in the week before the conference the Pales- tinian leadership called for stepping up the intifada, in order to keep pressure on the Israelis, and the Israelis fired a shot across Syria's bow by announc- ing plans for four new settlements on the Golan Heights. Without serious weapons of his own, Farouk al-Sharaa, Syria's hard-line Foreign Minister, replied with a symbolic blow, avowing that he would refuse to shake the hand of any Israeli until there was with- drawal from all occupied territories. In a gesture of Arab solidarity, the J or- danians declared that they would not shake hands with the Israelis, either; fortunately, no one believed that the conference was likely to succeed or fail over handshakes. What seemed much more consequential was that the stra- tegic changes in the region had laid the groundwork for genuine bargaining. How this bargaining developed would provide the drama of the conference, and an outcome that was by no means foreordained. I T was foggy in Madrid when my plane landed on the morning of Tuesday, October 29th, the day before the conference was to start. On arriv- ing at a fairground near the center of the city, where press facilities had been set up, I was issued my credentials- a plastic ID card with my name, publication, and passport number on it. I had expected a document equal to the ceremoniousness of the event, but it was disappointingly plain. Later, I was told that the Spanish had produced an ID marked "International Peace Conference," only to have it rejected by the Israelis, who insisted that they had contracted to attend a meeting for talks with their Arab neighbors and cc. . I f " L . k not an lnternatlona con erence. 1 e most others, the Spanish failed to grasp the distinction, much less its signifi- cance, but they took scissors and snipped off the offending line, leaving "PRENSA" as the sole designation. Having attached the card to my jacket lapel, I proceeded to a com- pound enclosed by a heavy wire fence. At the gate, a security man in the black uniform and beret of the Guardia Civil, and with an automatic weapon slung over his shoulder, checked the data on the card against the information in my passport. Inside the gate, I joined a queue of journalists waiting to enter the press center, a three-story ware- houselike building with glass-panelled walls, glamourously named the Crys- tal Pavilion. It took me half an hour to reach the door, where more security men, with unusual care, X-rayed my briefcase and frisked me with a metal detector. One of the reasons that Spain had been chosen for the peace confer- ence was that it was considered better at security than most of its European neighbors, having had plenty of prac- tice with its own Basque terrorists. Even before the conference opened, an Iranian cleric had called for mass assassinations, and the Palestinian